Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to computer security techniques and more particularly to a remotely-activated system that will cause a computer to selectively wipe its disk or other storage device if the computer has been lost, stolen or otherwise enters a situation where data may be compromised.
Description of the Prior Art
Computer disk wiping is known in the art. This is the process of over-writing addresses or tracks with known data patterns. It is possible to remove all data from a hard disk or other type of storage device thus rendering the original data unrecoverable by writing, and sometimes re-writing every sector with a known pattern. Some standards (such as some U.S. Department of Defense standards) require that every sector be over-written three times or some other number of times, and in some cases with a different data pattern each time. This can be very time-consuming taking many hours with large storage devices. Typical storage device over-write patterns (on a byte basis) may be alternating patterns such as 0x55 for the first pass, 0xAA for the second pass, and 0x3C for the third pass for example. It is important in storage device-wiping to make sure that storage at unmapped addresses is also be wiped. On storage devices that encrypt data, the encryption key may also be changed making it very difficult to read any stored data.
Many computers of all types are lost or stolen each year. It would be advantageous to have a system that could be managed from a remote location that would force a computer that is lost or stolen to wipe its disk or storage device (many electronic devices use storage devices that are not rotating storage devices) so that data is not compromised. However, as previously stated, simply wiping every address of today's large storage devices takes a long time. In the time it takes to wipe an entire storage device, a data thief could recover many files before their addresses were wiped. It would be advantageous to, not only control and activate wiping from a remote location, but to have a system that would wipe selected files first to get rid of all personal and confidential data before performing an entire storage device wipe. This would overwrite important files very quickly preventing their possible theft.